Always difficult, always controversial and always about as subtle as a brick to the head Danish maverick Lars Von Trier returns to the festival with Manderlay, the second film in the America trilogy launched with Dogville. While this film suffers some by comparison to Dogville I'm going to disagree strongly with Mathew's review below and say that this is vintage Von Trier: strong, powerful and bitingly satiric. This time out Von Trier turns his gaze on American race relations - or, more accurately he uses race relations as an image to examine power relationships - and, not surprisingly, nobody escapes his scathing criticism.
Manderlay picks up where Dogville left off. Grace is travelling with her father and his roving band of gangsters as they try to find a new territory to set up shop. When they stop for a break in Alabama they stumble across a cotton plantation called Manderlay, a place where slavery is still being practiced seventy years after abolition. Grace steps in determined to change things and is soon forcibly democratizing the entire establishment. To go any further than that in describing the plot would entail dipping into serious spoilers and I will refrain from doing so ...
Manderlay echos the unusual approach of Dogville. While the other Dogme directors have by and large abandoned the movement and returned to conventional film making techniques Von Trier has plowed ahead determined to find other means to reach the same intimate ends targetted by Dogme. In this case it means a film shot on a bare soundstage with utterly minimal sets - the occasional piece of furniture or partial wall and small props - with the action of the entire plantation often in full view. While artifical lighting, guns, and dolly and crane shots - all things banned by Dogme - are allowed here it is, nonetheless, another case of Von Trier limiting his technical palette to force himself to focus on his characters.
But calling them characters at all is something of a misnomer ... while Dogme aimed to create and capture real people in extreme situations these America films don't have an actual person in them. This is high satire. There is no attempt at realism, each of these characters is meant to embody some sort of political or idealogical position. The easiest trap to fall into with these films is to assume that Grace is speaking for Von Trier himself but that is very simply not the case. If anything Grace - with her naive idealism and belief that she has the moral authority to impose her views on others by force if neccessary leaving a broad swathe of ignored destruction in her wake - is Von Trier's primary target. As Mathew has pointed out in his review below Grace's understanding of race relations is laughably shallow but I suggest that this is not a failing but rather a very intentional feature: Grace represents the vocal faction that believes so simply and purely in their own idealogy that they've never once stopped to actually look at it or the consequences of it that they remain blissfully unaware of their own destructive power until it is far, far too late. Also skewered are the oppressors and the oppressed who are implicit in their own situation. Basically Lars is unhappy with everyone and very, very vocal about it.
Standing on its own strength Manderlay is a very strong film but it does suffer from the changes, largely cast changes, made after Dogville. Even by Von Trier standards - and we're talking about a man who once provoked an actor into removing their own shirt, cutting it up and eating it - Manderlay was a difficult shoot. Nicole Kidman opted out of the role of Grace at the last possible moment to take the large payday offered by Bewitched and while Dallas Howard is a talented actress with a bright future she is simply too young and too inexperienced to do the role justice. John C Reilly - who was slated for a major part - walked out of the shoot midway through to protest the on-camera slaughter of a donkey and his role was excised entirely. Willem Dafoe steps into the gangster-father role previously held by James Caan and while I generally like Dafoe a lot he could never even hope to compete with Caan's screen searing performance in the part. Von Trier has brought back Jean Marc Barr, Chloe Sevigny and Udo Kier but all - particularly Barr and Sevigny - are reduced to little more than window dressing. The slave cast is servicable but only Danny Glover and Isaach De Bankole truly stand out, which is a surprising step back from the complexity of village life in Dogville. There is no single performance here to rival Stellan Skaarsgaard, Paul Bettany or Phillip Baker Hall. While the cast is certainly strong enough fans of Dogville will likely spend the first couple chapters lamenting the lack of that previous film's principal cast.
Strongest in th middle section where it focuses on power politics in general rather than race relations in particular Manderlay is brash film, sure to provoke strong reactions. Von Trier's is a restless angry voice, decrying just about anything while offering very little in the way of solutions. He seems to be content to simply stand in the middle of the street and yell at the top of his lungs "You're doing it all wrong!&" Love him or hate him you very simply cannot ignore him.